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Response : If Christopher Johnson returns, he will return with all his prawn beings and take over the earth. The prawns enslave humans and require them to make cat food or die. Christopher Johnson reunites with Wikus only to remember that Wikus knocked him out, concluding with his decision to make Wikus’s wife and the rest of his family as prawns. Wikus agrees because there’s nothing else left of his human civilization. Wikus becomes more like prawns mentally and realizes that the human race deserves to be enslaved for all the wrong they have committed. My whole passage reminded me of a quote from Dawn that destroying what’s left of the human civilization wouldn’t make it better but different and different is what humanity needed to live prosperous without any evil need for power and this human/pawn civilization lived forever. Pawns turned humans into pawns when ever they felt they were worthy enough.

Dawn Quote of Jdahya and Lilith in chapter 5, Part 1 Womb.

“And you think destroying what was left of our cultures will make us better?”

District 9, is a film about aliens that has been reshaped into a scenario in which aliens are sheltered and a burden through the publics eye. The aliens are powerless, different and resemble cockroaches from a human perspective. People automatically reject the aliens out of fear. The government of course tries to make a profit, by taking the alien technology without the public knowing to produce more advance technology for warfare but fails in the attempt the alien technology is biologically engineered to work for only aliens. Society is completely bias towards the aliens because of how they look and where they live. A poor district that is very dangerous. There’s much symbolism in the film from racism, torture, religion, animal cruelty, totalitarianism, slavery, media saturation, warfare, realization that there’s just rights for humans and everything else have no rights because of our social dominance in this world. In the end of the film the main character sacrifices his needs for the better good of maybe saving a species. He puts his needs on hold for the better good. A film that puts into perspective how bad humans can be and the importance of self awareness, of how many things could be adverted if we just choose to inform ourselves.

The Movie District 9 had a few similarities with some of the books we read in class. One of the similarities it had to Caves of Steel was the fact that the aliens from the movie had their own place to stay, the same with the spacers. Humans and the aliens from the movie didn’t get along well with one another the same as how they didn’t get along with the spacers in the book. It took one man named Wikus van de Merwe when he was becoming an alien due to exposure to an alien substance to understand the way humans were treating the aliens and actually grew to accept them and let them live their lives in peace. Elijah from Caves of Steel also grew to accept spacers when he was partnered up with Olivaw and grew to understand Olivaw better. The movie can also be compared with the book Dawn. In the book, the only way to travel to different rooms is if you were an Oankali. In the movie: District 9, the only way to use an alien weapon was if you too were an alien. Lilith from Dawn and Wikus from District 9 were turning into one of the creatures slowly, and they were able to use anything the aliens had with ease. In some ways the movie also had some similarities to the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as well. In the book, the bounty hunters were getting rid of the androids that were coming in from another planet. In the movie, there were soldiers who wanted to eradicate the aliens. Lastly, there was one character by the name of Rick Deckard from the book who started to grow to accept androids.

A truly awkward event in to novel Dawn was when Jdahya performed the Onokali mating ritual on both Lilith and Joseph for the first time.

It was Joseph’s second time of ever seeing the alien creature. Jdahya presented itself to Joseph so he could get use to Jdahya’s grotesque appearance. At this point Jdahya’s goal was to get Joseph to trust it enough to change and improve his body chemistry. In order to do so, Jdahya had to drug him which made him semi-unconscious.

During Joseph’s semi-unconscious state, for some odd reason Jdahya thought it was okay to perform the trio mating ritual with Lilith and Joseph without Joseph’s consent. Lilith was okay with it since she had already performed this alone with Jdahya, but imagine the awkwardness Joseph must of felt when Jdahya’s sexual organs penetrated his skin. First of all this mating ritual involves 3 sexes instead of the usual human 2. Second, the emotional feelings Joseph was receiving were unnatural to humans. Third, this is Joseph’s second time of ever seeing the alien. He doesn’t even know Jdahya well enough to even consider this ritual as a possibility. In a way it seemed almost as it were rape from my perspective.

“Your children will know us, Lilith. You never will.” – Kahguyaht (Page 111)

When Kahguyaht said “you never will” It is implying that Lilith will never truly understand the Onakali (aliens) both physically nor mentally. Lilith does not have the sensory organs which the aliens posses. Their organs let them experience unimaginable sensations which we would never be able to experience nor understand. In a way it’s as trying to envision the 4th dimension. The 4th dimension is not something you can see, hear or touch. It is a something we cannot experience because we are bounded to own 3 dimension body and world. Scientist have an idea of what this phenomena is but, no one could truly understand the 4th dimension.

When it stated ” Your children will know us” it is implying that Lilith’s children will be genetically tampered with which will allow them to have sensory organs that are similar to the aliens. This is foreshadowing what will be of humans in the future. They will be a hybrid creature with traits of both alien and human. In a sense, the pureness of a human will be lost. When Kahguyaht stated this, Lilith said nothin. She has accepted her people’s faith and is no longer going against the aliens. Then again she never had a choice. It’s either agree with the aliens or be but back into suspended animation until she agrees.

Throughout the entire novel, humans never had to option to leave to Earth without being experimented on and genetically altered first. The Onakali believe that tampering with the humans will increase their chance for survival. The Onakali’s intensions are positive, but in doing so, it ripped the freedom right out of humanity.

“And you don’t understand us at all. You never will, really, though you’ll be given much more information about us.”

“Then put me back to sleep, dammit, and choose some-one you think is brighter! I never wanted this job!”

It was silent for several seconds. Finally, it said “Do you really believe I was disparaging your intelligence?”

She glared at it, refusing to answer. “I thought not. Your children will know us, Lilith. You never will. (Family II, The end of Chapter 12.)

I think this passage is very important because it shows that Lilith has no control of what the aliens to her. It also shows the aliens intentions to harvest a human for their own. This passage also shows how resilient Lilith is towards the aliens that she will not give in to their demands even though she clearly has no say. This passage is right after Paul tried to have her way with her she defends him, Lilith is full of empathy. The aliens clearly don’t care about her but have a purpose for her.

The comparison of how aliens treat humans vs. how humans treat animals

In the novel Dawn, alien Jdahya has been helping Lilith recover from what seems to be a nuclear war on earth. He has brought her among his ship and has been trying its best efforts to encourage her wellbeing. At first Lilith was trapped in a white boxed room without windows similar to a cage in which we would keep an animal. Jdahya along with other of his kind observed her intensely without Lilith even knowing that she was captured by aliens. The aliens did not tell her where she was because they knew that Lilith would be overwhelmed. Lilith was suffering in her caged box for two “awakened” years. Loneliness cause insanity and depression and the aliens were well of that. They wanted to wait for the right moment to introduce themselves. When Jdahya finally introduced himself and told her everything, Lilith became furious at the fact that no one told her anything about why she was in her box. Jdahya countered her a aggression with the simple term, “It was for your own good.” Similarly, that is what we do to animals. Being that we are more intelligent than animals, we do things to them that they don’t understand that may harm them now but will help them in the long-run. For example, giving a dog a shot for rabies. The dog is unwilling to take the shot but we forcefully give it to it because it’s for his own good. Lilith was fed regularly with plain tasting, colorless, yet nutritional food. Lilith detested it and wish she had something better tasting. Again this food was given to increase her health. We do the same to our pets. I’m sure that our pets hate eating the same repetitive foods over and over again but, we feed it to them because it increases there overall health. In conclusion, the aliens are treating the humans as animal. They are observing and experimenting with them.

Dawn by Octavia E. Butler is a great novel that reminded me of the 2012 film Prometheus when the reader realizes that protagonist, has been kept in confinement for two hundred and fifty four years. Reminded me of how the crew in Prometheus the passengers had traveled for two years to be awakened like it was nothing. Lilith didn’t even realize she was kept for that long. Another cool moment was when the aliens removed her cancer made me think if they had some advanced machinery like they did in the movie Prometheus. The novel also reminded me of the 2010 film Shutter Island, it’s also a novel in which the main character is distorted from a past event that he starts too see things that aren’t there. Dawn and the Shutter Island novel had kind of the similar beginning. I was really amazed by imagery in this novel best book so far that didn’t put me to sleep.

Octavia Butler’s Dawn is really an interesting book. The main question while reading through it is “why?” Why are the Oankali (an Alien race who have little to no facial features except for tentacles shaped around the eye sockets and no eyeballs) helping Lilith, a human who’s been imprisoned by them for around two years. She’s been by herself for a long time considering that her husband and only son have been in a fatal car accident that left them both dead, and with Cancer being in the family genes, her family suffered a great toll. However thanks to the Oankali, they cured her Cancer and made her live longer. The goal for the Oankali was to have Lilith train other humans in order to survive in the new world they’re going to be exposed to. My main question is still “why”? They never answer Lilith’s questions when she asks them, but they examine her without her consent. It feels like one of those horror movies where the main villain is usually the one you end up trusting the most because of how nice they are to you, only to get back stabbed. They act really nice towards even with doing what they did, but who knows? They’re not answering anything she’s asking, so they probably are hiding a secret from her.

Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn is a very terrifying outlook on what could happen to the human race. “Humanicide” is becoming more of a threat as destructive technologies keep advancing, and more countries are gaining access to nuclear weapons. What stood out for me was the social commentary Butler added to her writing. This novel was published in 1987 during the midst of the Cold War. The not so subtle hint at total nuclear devastation spoke measures back then, and it resonates even stronger now and in the near future. The actions of the Oankali mirrored the atrocities committed during the times of slavery in the United States. The Oankali treated the humans disgustingly, ignoring cries for clothes and depriving them of their culture. This novel holds a lot of reflection on the past and present times.

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The OpenLab at City Tech:A place to learn, work, and share

The OpenLab is an open-source, digital platform designed to support teaching and learning at New York City College of Technology (NYCCT), and to promote student and faculty engagement in the intellectual and social life of the college community.